Sunday, March 12, 2017

Born Again (a sermon for the 2nd Sunday of Lent)

Last week I mentioned that the
church has a communication problem when it comes to the words ‘temptation’ and
‘sin’; modern people don’t hear those words in anything like the way people did
in Bible times. So we trivialize them, or laugh at them, or deny any
implication that they might describe us. How dare you suggest we’re sinners! We’re
just as good as anyone else!

We’ve got a communication problem
this week, too. Our Gospel reading for today is from the third chapter of John,
and in the traditional translation, it includes that dreaded phrase, ‘born
again’. Whatever was in John’s mind when he first wrote that phrase – or
whatever was in the mind of Jesus when he first used it – we can be sure that’s
not the first thing people think of today. Today, when we hear ‘born again
Christian’, we think ‘Oh yes - those are the people who voted for Donald
Trump!’ And while I’m sure that there’s a variety of political opinion in St.
Margaret’s, I’m also pretty sure that the majority of us are shaking our heads
over Mr. Trump! So if born again Christians like him, how can it be good to be
a born again Christian?

But in our gospel, Jesus doesn’t
appear to think that being a ‘born again Christian’ is a bad thing. I mentioned
this once to a woman who told me that she ‘didn’t like born again Christians’.
I pointed out to her that, according to Jesus, there is no other kind of Christian. All Christians are, by
definition, ‘born again’ – or, as our NRSV translates it, ‘born from above’
(the Greek word, ‘anothen’, can be
translated either way). In John 3:3 Jesus says, “Very truly I tell you, no one
can see the kingdom of God without being born from above”, and he adds in verse
5, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being
born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born
of the Spirit is spirit”.

So there’s a process we have to
go through in order to enter the Kingdom of God. And remember, ‘The kingdom of
God’ doesn’t mean Christians dying and going to heaven; it’s about the love and
power of God healing and transforming this world so that it becomes the place
God meant it to be when he created it in the first place, completely free of
evil and sin. “Thy kingdom come” means “Thy will be done on earth as it is in
heaven”. Do you want to be part of that? I know I do! Well then, says Jesus,
you need to be born again, born from above, born of water but also of the Holy
Spirit.

How can we make sense of this
today?

Let’s try to make sense of it by
going back to our Old Testament reading. Let’s think about Abram – or, as he’s
better known, Abraham. In later years Abraham was looked on as the father of
the nation of Israel, but he didn’t start out living in what we now called
Israel. His origins were further east, in a place Genesis calls ‘Ur of the Chaldees’,
which most modern scholars think was in what is now southern Iraq, about two
hundred miles southeast of Babylon. However, at some point in his adult life Abram
and his family – including his father, his brothers, and their wives and
children – left Ur. They had meant to move to Canaan – what is now Palestine or
Israel – but for some reason they stopped in a city called Haran on what is now
the southeastern border of Turkey, and lived there for a few years.

But when Abram was seventy-five,
somehow (we don’t know exactly how), the God who created the universe spoke to
him.

This is an amazing thing and we
shouldn’t rush over it. I don’t know very much about the religion of Ur or
Haran, but I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that it was very similar to the
religion of Babylon. Like most people in the ancient near east, the Babylonians
worshipped many different gods; Abram would have been surrounded by their temples
and idols as he went about his daily life. The civic life of Ur and Haran would
have included community sacrifices to the gods, and everyone would have known
about the things they should and shouldn’t do if they wanted to avoid offending
them.

But in the Hebrew text, Genesis
is very specific about who was speaking to Abram; it doesn’t just say ‘God’ in
general, or one of the gods of Babylonian religion. It uses the name by which
the Israelites later came to know the one God, the creator of heaven and earth:
‘Yahweh’.

‘Now Yahweh said to Abram, “Go
from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I
will show you…So Abram went, as Yahweh had told him…’ (Genesis 12:1, 4a).

Abram had none of the things we
use to deepen our spiritual lives today. He didn’t have the Bible. He didn’t
have the sacraments. He didn’t have the teaching of Jesus. He didn’t have a
community of like-minded believers. He didn’t have multiple generations of
spiritual ancestors whose wisdom he could draw on. He was surrounded by people
who worshipped the ancient gods of Babylon, and yet somehow he heard the one creator
God speaking to him. “Leave all this behind, and go to the land I will show
you”. Leave everything you know, leave your safety and security. “Where to, God?”
“Never mind that; I’ll show you on the way there!”

We know that Abram kept herds and
flocks. I can imagine him scratching his head in confusion: “But God, I need to
know where I’m going to find pasture and water for my livestock. I need a plan.
I can’t just walk by faith; if I get it wrong, the animals will die and I’ll be
ruined”. We don’t know whether or not Abram prayed that sort of questioning
prayer, but we know from later stories about him that he was exactly the kind
of guy who would have asked those questions!

In our gospel reading, Nicodemus
misunderstands what Jesus means when he talks about being born again, or born
from above; he asks, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one
enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” (John 3:4). But here
in Genesis we have an example of of an old man being born again. In the ancient
world, seventy-five would have been a very great age indeed. Abram probably had
his retirement plan figured out. I’m sure he thought he was long past the time
of life when he would be going on adventures. But now he’s supposed to leave
all his security behind, and follow by faith the God who had spoken to him.
Leaving the security of the womb, out into the dark and dangerous and unknown
world. It was like being born. Or born again.

So what does the story of Abram
teach us about what a new birth is all about?

New birth is obviously a metaphor
for a decisive change in a person’s life – a break with the past and a new
beginning, walking by faith in the God who calls us. It reminds me of what Paul
says in Philippians 3:13:

‘But this one thing I do:
forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press
on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus’.

‘Forgetting what lies behind’.
Abram was called to make a real break with the past, and with the beliefs and
practices of the vast majority of the people around him. He would have stood
out like a sore thumb in the world he was living in. “What do you mean, you
don’t worship the gods? What are you going to do when your crops fail? What are
you going to do when someone in your family gets sick? And if you stop
worshipping them, they’ll get mad at the whole community and bad things will
happen to us”. I can just imagine the sort of pressure Abram would have been
under, in his old home of Haran and in the new land he moved to in Canaan. In
those days it would be taken for granted that if you moved to a new country you
learned to worship the gods of that country. But everywhere Abram went in
Canaan he built an altar to his God,
the Creator, the one who had called him.

In the Book of Acts, we read
about how Paul planted a new congregation in the Greek city of Thessalonica,
and three weeks later he had to leave in a hurry because of persecution. A
while later he wrote a letter to the tiny congregation in Thessalonica. He
reminded them of their conversion – their ‘new birth’, if you like. He says,

‘For the people of those regions
report about us what kind of welcome we had among you, and how you turned to
God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from
heaven – Jesus, who rescues us from the wrath that is coming’ (1 Thessalonians
1:9-10).

So that’s part of what it means to
be ‘born again’ – we turn away from the
idols everyone worships around us and turn to the true God who has revealed
himself to us in Jesus. Nowadays, of course, those idols aren’t pagan gods
like Ishtar and Marduk, or Zeus or Apollo. They’re more likely to be the idols
of money and the things that it can buy, or popularity, or youth and beauty, or
national security. Jesus himself refers to money as an idol when he says ‘You
can’t serve both God and Mammon’. In the context, ‘mammon’ obviously means worldly
wealth, but when you personalize a thing like that, giving it a name, you treat
it like a false god, an idol. And money is obviously treated as an idol today.
When they have a lot of money in the bank, people feel secure; they have
confidence that bad things can’t do so much harm to them. They also have a
sense that their life has a meaning or purpose; the grand narrative of our
lives today is that increasing wealth means success, so if I’m getting
wealthier, I’m obviously successful.

If we choose not to participate
in the worship of mammon, we’ll look just as weird in the world today as
Abraham did when he stopped worshipping the gods of his ancestors, or as the
early Christians did when they refused to participate in civic sacrifices to
the Greek and Roman gods, or to the emperor as a god. But that’s part of what it
means to be born again. What’s the true god of our life, the thing we value
more than anything else, the thing we rely on when the going gets tough, the
thing that gives us a sense of security and purpose and meaning? Being ‘born
again’ means to take the terrifying risk of dethroning that idol, and learning
to seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness.

And that leads to the next thing:
being ‘born again’ also means making a
decision to adopt the priorities of God’s Kingdom. That’s why Jesus
associates the two: ‘No one can see the Kingdom of God without being born from
above’ (John 3:3). Jesus has told us what the values of the Kingdom are: we
love God with our whole heart, soul, mind and strength, and we love our
neighbour as ourselves. And we dedicate ourselves to living and sharing God’s
love with the people around us. I love the way God describes that call to Abram
in our first reading:

“I will make of you a great
nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a
blessing…and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis
12:2, 3b).

The kingdom of the world says
it’s everyone for himself; it’s all about you as an individual, your rights,
your success, your happiness. You are the king and god of all you see! But
God’s kingdom says, “No! It’s about living each day with the intent of being a
blessing to the people around you, a channel into their lives for God’s love and
joy and stubborn hope.

So being born again means dethroning
our favourite false gods, and committing ourselves to the Kingdom of God as our
priority. A third thing we can say about it is that it’s two steps forward and one step back. A new birth is a beginning,
but it’s not all plain sailing from that day forward. It wasn’t in Bible times
and it isn’t today.

Abraham didn’t get it right all
the time. When you read his story in Genesis chapters 12 to 25, it’s very
honest about his doubts and weaknesses and failures. He has a hard time
believing God’s impossible promise that he and his wife will have a son in
their old age. He’s afraid of the people around him, and he tells lies to save
his own skin. He lets himself be manipulated, especially by his wife. He’s not
a superhero; he’s a real human being, just like us.

Last week we talked about our
‘human propensity to mess things up’. We break things, and people, and
relationships. We’re given the freedom to make real decisions, but we seem to
have an extraordinary talent for making bad
decisions. I do it. You do it. We all do it. And this doesn’t instantly change
when we become followers of Jesus. The day after we choose to follow Jesus,
we’ve had exactly twenty-four hours’ training in the kingdom of God, and many
years’ of training in the kingdom of the worship of money and success and
selfishness! It’s going to be a long, gradual process, growing and learning and
being trained as disciples of Jesus. A new birth is just that: a birth. After
the birth comes the growing and learning. So we have to be patient with ourselves,
and patient with others.

And we have to trust the Holy Spirit. That’s the last thing I want to
say about being born again. It’s not something we can do to ourselves. We can’t
make it happen. There’s no formula, no ceremony, nothing we can do to command
the Holy Spirit to act. He’s like the wind: he’s not under anyone’s control.

“The wind blows where it chooses,
and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where
it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8).

We humans tend to go through what
we refer to as ‘phases’ in our lives. I went through my Star Trek phase, and my
Bruce Cockburn phase, and my social activist phase, and when I look back on
them now I shake my head a bit and think “Well, those were good things, but I
probably went a bit overboard”.

But being a Christian, if it’s
real, isn’t just a phase. When I was thirteen my Dad gave me a gentle
challenge: “You’ve never given your life to Jesus, have you?” I went away that
night, sat down on my bed in the privacy of my room, and prayed a simple prayer
in exactly those terms: “Jesus, I give my life to you”. It wasn’t a dramatic
experience; I didn’t see visions or really feel overwhelmed by the love of God.
But when I look back on it now, I see it was one of the most important moments
of my life. The Holy Spirit must have been at work; that’s the only thing I can
say. That day I began a journey of learning to pray and listen to God’s Word in
the Bible, learning to be a member of the Body of Christ, learning to do God’s
will in the world. That journey has continued to this day. And I’m convinced
that the Holy Spirit brought me to that moment. I have no other explanation for
it.

And we can trust the Holy Spirit;
he is God, and God is love. So don’t be afraid of this ‘born again’ talk. And
don’t be afraid of what it means: dethroning your favourite idols, seeking
first God’s Kingdom, moving slowly ahead in a ‘two steps forward, one step back
sort of way’, all under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit
won’t lead you astray. He will lead you into the centre of God’s loving will
for you, and that may be hard, but it will always be good.